Portage Lake Resort

What a former resort community means

Small houses on a lake in Michigan very often started life as seasonal cottages, built to be used from spring to fall and closed up for the winter. Many have since been converted to year-round use, and the quality of that conversion varies enormously.

The specific things to establish are not exotic but they are easy to skip. Insulation and the presence of a proper vapor barrier, since a summer cottage was built with neither. The foundation — whether the house sits on a full basement, a crawl space, a slab or piers, and whether that has been underpinned. Water supply and waste, and whether the systems are sized and permitted for year-round occupancy. Heating that was added later rather than designed in. And plumbing runs that may still be routed as though the house will be drained each October.

None of that makes a converted cottage a poor buy. Many are excellent. But a 900-square-foot house on a lake and a 900-square-foot house on a subdivision street are not the same product, and a general inspection that treats them alike is not doing the work.

The lake, and the rights that attach to it

Portage Lake is 644 acres and all-sports, meaning motorized recreation is permitted — which is a genuine amenity and a genuine consideration depending on which side of it you fall. It is part of the Huron River Chain of Lakes, so it is connected water rather than an isolated pond.

Water rights here are the central question and they come in distinct forms that listings collapse. Frontage means the lot line meets the water, and in Michigan riparian rights attach to it. Canal frontage is frontage on connected water rather than the lake itself, which is a different product and prices differently. Deeded access is a specific recorded right to reach and use the water at a defined place without the lot touching it. And a shared common access is a right held with others over a designated parcel, usually with rules about what may be kept there.

Establish which one a specific lot carries and which recorded document creates it. Then establish what may be kept at the water: a dock, a hoist, a boat, and on what terms. Where a listing says lake access without naming the instrument, that is a question rather than a feature.

Living on a chain lake

Floodplain status is parcel-specific and it is what a lender cares about. Whether a property sits in a mapped special flood hazard area determines whether flood insurance is required.

Lake levels on a chain are managed rather than natural in their behavior, and how a particular lot sits relative to high water is worth observing in a wet spring rather than reading about. So is how the road serving the property drains, since resort-era platting frequently produced narrow roads on low ground.

Road status is worth checking generally.

The river corridor

The Huron between Ann Arbor and Dexter is one of the better-protected river corridors in southeast Michigan. Three metroparks sit along it — Delhi on the rapids about five miles west of Ann Arbor, Dexter-Huron upstream of it, and Hudson Mills at 8801 North Territorial Road.

The Border-to-Border Trail runs the corridor, connecting downtown Dexter to the Dexter-Huron and Delhi metroparks through riverfront, woodland and prairie, and the Huron River Water Trail follows the same stretch for paddlers. The run from Hudson Mills down to Dexter-Huron is a standard trip.

That is publicly funded and permanent open space rather than association amenity. It requires no assessment, it is maintained without a special levy, and it is not going to be sold — which is a different proposition from open ground that simply has not been built on yet.

Dexter is several different places

Samuel William Dexter arrived in 1824, thirteen years before Michigan became a state, and bought a large parcel. The settlement was established as a village in 1830 and remained one until November 20, 2014, when — after a process spanning eight years — the Village of Dexter became the City of Dexter, its voter-approved charter filed with the state.

That change matters more than it sounds. Those inside the new city stopped being residents or taxpayers of the townships the village had straddled, so a property in the city and one a mile outside now answer to different taxing authorities, and comparable sales from before 2014 predate the split.

A Dexter mailing address, meanwhile, reaches across Scio, Webster, Dexter and Lima townships, and Dexter Community Schools crosses all of them while matching none exactly. Two listings both saying Dexter can therefore differ in municipality, in tax rate and in school assignment.

The founder left a house behind. Samuel Dexter was born in Boston in 1792, the son of a politician who served as Secretary of War and of the Treasury under John Adams; he came to Michigan in 1824, became a land developer and civic leader, founded several towns, and named this village after his father when he established it in 1830. Gordon Hall, the Greek Revival house he built on a hilltop above the town between 1841 and 1843, was designed by Calvin T. Fillmore — brother of the president — with Sylvester Newkirk overseeing construction, and took two years largely because lumber was hard to get from Flint and Detroit. It carries a hexastyle Doric portico, runs about 2,500 square feet on each of its two main floors with unfinished attic and basement space above and below, and originally held 22 rooms, nine fireplaces and 55 windows. It became a Michigan State Historic Site in 1958, was listed on the National Register on November 9, 1972, and was bought by the Dexter Area Historical Society in 2006.

March 15, 2012

On the afternoon of March 15, 2012 an EF3 tornado cut a path of nearly eight miles through this part of Washtenaw County, with peak winds of 135 to 140 miles an hour. It damaged more than two hundred homes and businesses by the county's final assessment, brought down hundreds of trees, and left about twenty houses needing demolition. Total damage came to just under $10 million.

Nobody was injured, which given the strength of the storm and the hour of the day was remarkable. Most of what was damaged or destroyed has since been rebuilt, though some work continued for years afterward.

For a buyer this is a live diligence item rather than a historical note, and it is the Dexter equivalent of the flood question in Dearborn. A house in or near the path may have been repaired or substantially rebuilt in 2012 and 2013 — which is worth knowing, because it means newer roofing, siding, windows or framing than the build year suggests, and because the quality and permitting of that work varied.

Ask directly whether the specific property was affected and what was done. Where it was, the permits and the contractor records are the documentation that matters, and a seller who has them is in a materially stronger position than one who does not.

Schools

Portage Lake Resort is served by Dexter Community Schools. The district crosses several townships and does not follow municipal boundaries, and assignment is set by address.

Buying or selling here

The variation here is greater than in almost any subdivision, because the houses were built individually over a long period for a purpose most of them no longer serve. Comparable sales need matching on water rights first, then on whether and how well the house has been converted, and only then on size.

For a seller, documentation is the entire argument: the recorded water right, permits for any conversion work, the heating and insulation specification, the well and septic records, and clarity on road status. Each answers a question a serious buyer will ask, and answering them in advance is what separates a clean sale from a renegotiated one.

For a buyer, the order is water rights, then the conversion, then flood and drainage, then the house. On a lake lot the building is rarely the variable that decides the price.